The invention relates generally to liquid treatment devices and methods. More particularly, this invention relates to water treatment devices and methods.
The imbalance between the scarcity and the need of consumable water in the world increases dramatically these years. Thus, water treatment device and method with high water recovery are more and more wanted.
Christopher J. Gabelich et al. publishes on Journal of Membrane Science 301 (2007) 131-141 an article titled as “High-recovery reverse osmosis desalination using intermediate chemical demineralization”. The article discloses a two-stage reverse osmosis (RO) process involving intermediate chemical demineralization (ICD) of the concentrate stream from a primary RO (PRO) followed by secondary RO (SRO) desalting.
Because of scaling risk, the salinity (characterized by, e.g., the concentration of salts or other ionic impurities), the hardness (characterized by, e.g., the concentration of Ca2+, Mg2+, Ba2+ etc.) the alkalinity (characterized by, e.g., the concentration of CaCO3) and the concentration of silica are important factors of determining the water quality after treating the concentrate water from, e.g., the membrane desalination device, the cooling tower or any other thermal evaporation device and the process in the article and other prior arts do not provide satisfactory results so far.
Therefore, there is a need to develop a new water treatment device and method.